CAROL’S SUMMARY:
Northwest Missouri State piloted the entire curriculum on-line last year using the Sony Reader, the article below states. While there were many growing pains, the university should be given credit for pioneering in an area which is most certainly the future of learning and project-based study. If publishers want to prevent their industry from being the next automotive example, they need to do these things:
1) Buy or partner with Kindle, Sony and makers of these machines. Publishers will need some stake in the hardware business so that they can develop the necessary learning platforms.
2) Work with the gaming theorists. Students today have grown up on games, and we have a lot to learn about meaningful, dynamic ways to retain information from the gaming companies and people who produce these programs.
3) Live and breathe with students– talented students, struggling students, learning disabled students, returning adults and everything in between. Technology allows us to moderate content for these learners to truly produce individuated instruction.
4) Work with your authors. Training, as the article below indicates, is a huge area for both students and faculty. “Star” authors can help negotiate this divide and teach people on-line, in-person and through sessions like Web X.
5) Don’t think book. Think learning experience and realize that technology opens the door for students to have experience as well as knowledge–two things they desperately need to be competitive in the global
world. In the future, publishers will look more like producers of television shows than creators of static books that need revisions every two or three years, as both students and professors will participate in this dynamic process. We need to consider how learning and teaching will be different because of the opportunities that technology affords.

ARTICLEChronicle of Higher Education
By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Northwest Missouri State University nearly became the first public university to deliver all of its textbooks electronically. Last year the institution’s tech-happy president, Dean L. Hubbard, bought a Kindle, Amazon’s e-book reading device, and liked it so much that he wanted to give every incoming student one. The university already runs an unusual textbook-rental program that buys thousands of printed books for students who pay a flat, per-credit fee. Mr. Hubbard saw in the gadget a way to drastically cut the rental program’s annual $800,000 price tag, since e-books generally cost half the price of printed textbooks.